Lean in Quiz game with 100+ levels. Or, how to save on any idea launch?

Hello guys,Our team received another request to create a Trivia Quiz Game a couple weeks ago. Probably, you‘ve played Trivia Crack Game? If no, you need to try it. Nothing complicated. But However! The main points in any product are its users. Everyone is hunting for them. Let’s pause on Product/Market Fit for now and go through the standard initial requirements that are provided for an estimate:

Custom server side;

Admin Panel;

Native iOS and Android apps;

Possibility to add/edit campaigns from admin panel;

Possibility to add levels from admin panel;

Every campaign should consist of max 100 levels;

Every level should consist of 20 questions and 4 variants to answer;

The user should have 3 lives on each level;

In-app purchases and ads;

Design for every level. And some basics:

Login, user profile, achievements, and leaderboards.

The most complicated part is working on a template for creating campaigns and levels. The only thing you’ll need after is only design for each level. So, let’s check how long the full version would take.

It is needed to create a design that must be close to campaign’s theme and its questions for such an app. So, design is the most required and the most affordable part of this project. The main goal is to find the design pallet and create the first screen. And it would take less time after. To create such an app you need 3,5 months and around $30,000 even in case of strict planning (parallel development).

That’s ok, if you have a strict marketing plan and you are going to generate minimum $5k per month. BUT! Why do you need such a complex app with lots of campaigns and levels if you still don’t have your users? And what's more, you do want to save more money for marketing and promotion.

“The game should be for all ages and for all countries” - Oh, c’mon . Are you serious? There should be a target audience. The main point of the product is to find a Product/Market Fit and for this reason we need to work on attracting Innovators. Based on this, let’s cut some features out:Let’s imagine, that our target audience is young US-based gigs (let them be teenagers). We found out that 59% of them are using iOS devices after market analyzes. Despite the fact, that all market in-app purchases are divided 80/20 (iOS/Android), we need to be concentrated on attracting users. So, why can’t we concentrate on this audience? We can cut down development time and efforts up to 40% only thanks to this info. You don’t believe me? Let’s get into details:

Custom server side;You don’t need it at all. There could be a cloud-based server for the first x versions till the app would have 50+k of users. What’s more, we also don’t need it at our MVP.

Admin Panel;There is no need in this too. The first 100 levels can be inputted manually into the app.

Possibility to add/edit campaigns;We are working on searching Product/Market Fit, so there is no need in this also.

Possibility to add levels;We don’t need it also for now.

Every campaign should consist of 100 levels;50 levels and 1 campaign would be enough for idea testing;

Every level should consist of 20 questions and 4 variants of answers;

The user has 3 lives for every level;These are basic points of the app, so we need to keep them.

In-app purchases and ads;We are testing the idea. There is no need in this now.

Design for each level;General app logic and design is our main points that would attract users.

Login, user profile, achievements, and leaderboards;These features could be simplified. We can start with the using of Game Center Leaderboard and Achievements. In this case, users will compete with each other and we would cut down a lot of server work. As for login, We can simplify this down to 1 tap with adding 2 buttons “login with FB” and “login with Twitter”.

Analytic tool;It wasn’t mentioned in initial requirements, but it is highly required for every! research.

So, let’s see what we have now:

Conclusions

Current MVP version needs just 7 weeks to launch and $14,000. As you see, it is twice cheaper and 30% faster. Would you rather save $16k and find out that the market is in the need of your app, or loose $30k and play alone?

So, we need to concentrate our efforts on attracting users. Only after there would be a reason to work on:

Templates of levels;

Android version;

Custom server side.

Otherwise, you can just waste $16k and 1+ month. Based on everything we mentioned before, put some questions to yourself:

Do you think the audience will use such app?Is such a system affordable?Do you think such an approach could worth of using?

The main point here is that the quality of the game stays outstanding and it is easy to scale it. You don’t need to use cross-platform and have a buggy system, as you do understand what your users would say about the service behind such a quality.

Just share our article If you do agree with our approach,. If you are not 100% sure how to implement it in your particular situation then drop us a line.

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if you would like to read more about Lean, MVP, and their underwater stones just follow this link.